We are already done with famous SEO times of link farms and black hat link building techniques. What is the future of SEO? Is it building relationships on the human level and producing content in different formats like the audio, video?

Brendan Hufford explains it all in the most practical way on how to leverage relationships to start the SEO engine and produce content in different formats for visibility to a wider audience.

Future of SEO is about relationships & content types with Brendan Hufford

01. SEO and relationships

I am going to quote you here, “… I think breaking down the myths around SEO and helping people understand that the future of SEO is all about relationships is what I want to change”. Can you explain about relationships here in the context of SEO?

Are there any steps or methodology to build these relationships and achieve success for the content with SEO in the mix?

02. Link building and relationships

Going deeper into relationships and link building. Now, I am interviewing you and I am going to post about this with your website link on my website. So, my first contact with you is as a person rather than as a consumer of your content but it still results in a link back that initials the SEO engine. Is this the right analogy?

What about relationship building with companies and product entities? Does that figure in this SEO relationship building mix?

Building a direct relationship with consumers of your content via email list building, Facebook groups, enrollment in courses – does this in any way have a trickle effect on enhancing SEO value of your publicly available content?

03. Content types diversification

Earlier we primarily had textual content with few images and all our SEO efforts were on optimizing that type of content. Now, with more audio and video content – has SEO become more complex?

The future of SEO requires more focus on futuristic content types. For example, in the case of videos, Youtube itself has become a big search engine. So, someone producing videos, what important things need to be checked with regard to SEO for video publishing?

The other popular content type revolution is happening in the form of audio as podcasts and voice-based search. Are there any basic dos and don’t with regard to the publishing of audio content and making it more accessible with the power of SEO?

04. Content Length & Types for SEO

Writing super long form content is always considered a gold mine from the SEO point of view. However, now people have less time and patience in reading such long-form text-based content as we are getting more use to videos and podcasts. So, is writing long-form content still a golden practice?

Let’s take a practical example, on one side we have a 5000 words article with 4 main sections. On the other side, we split those 4 sections as individual posts with 500-800 words worth of content. Which will be more rewarding and pleasing for Google god?

Directory listing type of websites is getting popular like a collection of tools and resource. On such a website, each page lists a tool with 100 to 200 words description. Is such content an SEO disaster or Google do shower some love this?

Wearing the same SEO disaster glasses, what about weekly roundup posts like best articles of specific niche from other websites?

05. SEO for social media content

Sometimes, I do see Pinterest posts in the search results. I remember seeing Facebook posts from Facebook pages in the search result as well. SEO for content posted on social media, does such a concept exist?

Social media websites driving direct traffic to your content, is that good signal for better organic search performance in near future or Google buckets is as “not so important” activity with regard to your content?

06. Future of SEO industry

Link building practices have seen big changes over a period of a few years. Earlier, it was dominated by link farms and black hat activity of buying links. Now, things have mellowed on that front. So, can we expect more natural link building when looking at SEO in the future?

With more audio and video content, won’t it get difficult for even search engines like Google to make measure SEO value of content in these formats?